Two people stole several artworks from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-Sur-Mer, a small town in southern France, early Tuesday, the authorities said — the latest high-profile art theft in Europe as the continent’s cultural sites struggle to keep their precious objects safe.
The thieves, who were caught on surveillance camera, initially stole four paintings but dropped two as they escaped, the city’s mayor, Bryan Masson, said in a broadcast interview. The authorities had said earlier that the pair made away with three artworks.
The thieves used “an electric knife” or “a metal saw” to cut through the bolts holding the paintings’ frames, Masson said. According to a statement from the Town Hall on social media. an alarm rang shortly before 6 a.m., and the police rushed to the museum, which was formerly the home of the leading Impressionist painter Pierre August Renoir.
Masson said the thieves had acted like “a commando unit”: “They were well-informed, they were well equipped. They did it very quickly and very well — but their haste was their undoing,” he said.
He added that the thieves “fled into the gardens and dropped two works along the way.”
The Town Hall did not specify which artworks were stolen, but the museum’s permanent collection holds 13 paintings and about 40 sculptures by Renoir, as well as furniture that belonged to his family, and photographs.
The brazen theft occurred almost exactly a year after thieves broke into one of the Louvre museum’s gilded galleries and stole royal jewels worth over $100 million — the most striking in a series of recent thefts from cultural and religious sites in France.
Two recent parliamentary inquiries highlighted that France was ill-prepared to ensure the security of its artworks. The culture ministry’s annual survey of museums in 2024, for example, showed that only 23 percent of the 616 organizations examined had an emergency and risk prevention plan and that almost half had no video surveillance system.
The culture ministry published a plan in July, attempting to address what it described as “increasingly organized, swift and determined” thefts. The document included 33 measures, such as mapping out the most vulnerable sites, recruiting specialized police officers and adding extra security for pieces considered at risk.
The Renoir Museum that was the site of Tuesday’s thefts is a charming stone house, surrounded by olive trees, where the artist came to live in the early 20th century to treat his rheumatoid arthritis. It was turned into a museum in 1960, with pieces in its permanent collection including a still life, landscapes, portraits and an unfinished version of his famous work “The Great Bathers.” (A finished version is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
“Attacking the Renoir Museum amounts to attacking part of Cagnes-sur-Mer’s history and heritage,” the mayor said on social media. He said that the theft was “particularly serious” and that it underscored the need for “a comprehensive plan to secure our museums and protect our works of art.”
Jean-Luc Bragato, a local police union representative, said in a broadcast interview that clues had been left inside the museum that would help the police track down the thieves. The authorities said the museum was closed until further notice.
Other recent museum thefts in France have included nuggets of raw gold worth about $700,000 taken from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, dishes worth $11 million from a museum in a city known for its porcelain, and 100 Huguenot golden crosses stolen from a small museum. According to a Senate report, 22 thefts were reported in French museums last year, including three at national museums.
In July, the Princess of Vix’s gold torque — “a 2,500-year-old masterpiece of Celtic goldsmithing,” according to the French culture ministry — was stolen in broad daylight from a museum in the Burgundy region.
Cultural sites in countries like Italy and Spain have also been targeted. In a report published last month, Europol, the inter-European police force, warned of “a shift in both methods and targeting” in museum heists, with thieves using more “violent and forceful methods.”
